February, 2008

A while back I explained what Orders of Magnitude is all about as it's one of those overused but poorly understood terms. In the same vein I was pleased to see Mark Harrison's explanation of Zero Sum Gain. It's a phrase I hear a fair bit from people like Bill Gates and others but I never really took the time to understand it - I also thought it would look stupid to stop Bill and ask him :)

A cool new service from our UK search team - BigSnapSearch.com brings prizes to your searches. This is such a cool idea :)

When you perform a search and get the results you will also see two cards at the top of the page – if the cards match you win. Simple! The team is giving away a prize an hour, 24 hours a day for 8 weeks. Needless to say you can search as much as you like to improve your chances of winning :)

You can win one of 23 x Virgin Experience Days + 1 x £500 Virgin Vouchers , plus a star prize of a week for two on Richard Branson’s Necker island worth over £12,000 plus free flights to the Caribbean!

Congrats to Nick Halstead and the team - fav.or.it is live. I've been playing with it for the last few days and I'm very impressed. it's all Nick said it would be and has a lot of potential to lure people away from Google Reader.

Slices, catalogues, the ability to comment direct in the tool and some fascinating stats make it a killer app.

[update] playing some more and hoping Nick will open up the invite process soon. Apart from a minor UI colour gripe, I'm enjoying it. would also be good to hide the fee/slice pane. I predict the comments on blogs will rise due to the ease of which fav.or.it does comment syndication. very nice.

With both my Vaio SZ and TZ I wiped them clean on arrival and built them from the ground up with Vista Ultimate. It was a total nightmare getting all the drivers and some of the more useful 3rd party software reinstalled (e.g. WinDVD).

Now, finally, the Windows OEM's are delivering naked machines which is goodness for Vista. With this shift we'll see much more realistic Vista performance and behaviour for users. Hats off to Sony and hat tip to CrunchGear.